


Telltales of a Storyteller

by alkatie



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, Adventure, Aliens, Angst and Fluff, Another surviving Timelord, Canon Pairing, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Enemies to Friends, Genderfluid OC, OC/OC - Freeform, Post-Time War, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Slight Humor, Slight swearing, TARDIS has a personality, Time Lords and Ladies, Time War Angst, follows OC, headcannon worldbuilding, hurt and compfort, mentioned genocide, no Doctor/OFC, oneshots with a soryline, regeneration is a lottery, season 5-10, self hate, slight dark doctor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 10:37:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12167235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alkatie/pseuds/alkatie
Summary: She only knew him from Borussa's constant complains and the legends. Now she had to travel with that foolish, timetodd-behaving murderer and his beloved humans in that old Type 40 through the universe. She still prefers it to the loneliness of being the only one left of her kind.AU-Collection of oneshots and drabbles with another surviving Timelady. An old, stuffy Timelady. Oh Joy!





	Telltales of a Storyteller

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters are owned by BBC and its creators. I don’t profit in any form from writing this (other than having fun).
> 
> (Between S6, Ep. 2 and 3)
> 
> For thousand years she had slept. Now she had to find her way back…  
> Just to realize there was nowhere to go anymore.

\------------o0O0o------------

 

Everything. Lack of far, of near, of could be, would be, should be, never be future. Lack of repeating, of far, of between, of forgotten and remembered past. Of could be, should be, would be, never had happened. Just the present. Everything is happening, was happening, and will happen now.

 

This is Time.

  
Time doesn’t pass. It exists all at once. The present is eternal. Future and past are only constructs of life. A structure relative to an individual point of view, moving through life and experiencing one possible moment after another, influenced by decisions and fate.

 

And the realisation that this had been a thought. There had been one again and again and again. Proceeding like that would lead to an endless chain of repeating the same conclusion over and over for all eternity.

 

But wasn’t this eternity anyway? The slow manifestation of the fact, of the existence of thoughts, of a consciousness. And the consciousness slowly realised the awareness for the experience of the surrounding time. There was an entity, a consciousness floating in the eternity of the present. Everywhere, every time, all at once and still nowhere. There was will, should, would: an eternity of possibilities, of feelings or the lack of them. There was will, should, would, could be, what, who, when: existing or not, between a never-ending number of beings, places, and time.

 

Then there was _something_. Existing everywhere, just like the consciousness but not as shattered and lost. No, this _something_ was a constant, and could be everywhere but it wasn’t. It wasn’t only in the present. It was aware of all aspects of time, able to differ and move. Alive.

  
It took the consciousness, it carefully nudged and offered help, and the consciousness clawed into the _something_. A drowning man in a crowd sharing his fate always pushed everybody else under, just to get a hold of desired air. With the same ruthlessness born out of despair, the consciousness ignored the screams of anger, pain, betrayal, and pulled up, leaving bloody marks on the saving lifeline. Pulled, pushed, clawed, climbed, and followed until the sea of moments down there became tinier and tinier, until a pattern became more and more visible. First, the fabric of time itself webbed carefully: constantly renewing and changing, yet so beautiful. Then time strings, the general directions, tied together by fixed points. The consciousness followed the _something_ into one particular, one full of pain and curiosity. The one where a Time Lord stole a TARDIS and ran away. The one full of scars and scattered fringes which indicated a war, with time itself used as a weapon.

 

And it was the right one, the consciousness was sure of it. There were memories of a time war in its depths. As they both neared themselves, one possibility after another shattered, they didn’t disappear but the consciousness… she was able to differ between the ones currently happening and the ones that didn’t. She. Her species only had two genders, although she was able to change into the other one but only while dying. No, _regenerating_. Although, it was basically one and the same but not quite. Time Lords were able to die, well and truly die. The event was very unlikely, but it happened. Everything ended after all.

 

_Time Lords._ With the name of her species, another name came to mind and she wanted to scream it into time itself. She was so happy to remember her own name again. But then only through the existence of this idea, she suddenly saw terrible things happen in the future, and she painfully remembered why a Time Lord was able to say their name only once in their life without any danger coming from it. So she never did. Instead, she ruled out every timeline where she was anything other than a member of this Gallifreyan species. Just a body with four limbs, two legs and arms, two hands with five fingers each including a thumb (oh, how she loved thumbs), and two feet with five toes each. One joint in each limb called knees and elbows. A head with hair and a face, two eyes as optical sensors, two ears, a mouth with teeth and a tongue, and one nose in the middle of the face (above the mouth and between the eyes). Warm and soft skin, but which colour? What about her hair and her eyes?

 

Apparently it had to wait until they had it down to the current timeline. Timelines, actually. She always saw more than one, even when she knew exactly which one was the current one. Losing herself into the depths of time so she even forgot which time was the right one only happened whenever she regenerated.

  
Oh.

  
_Oh, please, no!_ She liked her last body, thank you very much.

  
Now she had no idea what she looked like, and that was a big problem because it normally helped her to stay in touch with the current timeline. What if she accidently followed the wrong one now? Lady Storyteller sighed, then smiled. Storyteller. Her new name.

  
_Storyteller_ , repeated the Thing. The TARDIS.

  
Surprised, Lady Storyteller let go for a second. But it was enough, and the wounded, bitter Time Being left.

  
“NO!” She whispered, screamed and begged. She wasn’t ready to be on her own, not yet. She didn’t even know her own voice.

“Please!”

  
She could have been gentler, would have been gentler if she had known. Known the _something_ was _someone_ , a living being, a wonder created by her people. Known what she— _who_ Lady Storyteller was.

  
There were screams. Definitely one, sometimes two or more beings, but all of them shouting at the TARDIS.

   
For the first time, Lady Storyteller opened her eyes. There were still too many timelines trying to manifest in her sight and the overlaying of them made her dizzy, but she was lying on the floor in a room somewhere. White or orange or made of a coral structure, but surprisingly constant. The inner of a TARDIS, probably _the_ TARDIS. The one she had accidently hurt.

 

There was a man. His facial features and clothing changed periodically but he always yelled at the TARDIS in a foreign language while running towards her, a desperate look on his face and his hand reaching out to her.

  
A Time Lord, just like her. Something terrible had to have happened if anyone of her species ever allowed themself to show such an expression of panic. She lifted herself onto her elbow and stretched out her hand when she realised his fading colours.

  
“NO!”

  
She forced herself to stand up, stumbling forward to him but he was gone before they could reach each other, and she was left behind as the TARDIS dematerialised around her.

 

\------------o0O0o------------

 

This was not Gallifrey. The environment of her home was strictly controlled, turned into an artificial fix point so nobody turned mad with the possibilities of various environmental states, unlike whatever she was standing on now. It was a strange phenomenon of time but as long as one stayed in one time string, the positions of places never changed. They either existed or not. They can change appearances, sure, but they always stayed where they were.

 

Still, she needed a fix point. She took a step and hissed in pain, letting herself slump to the bottom. This was an emergency and there was no time to care for her appearance. She was alone anyway. Her boots were far too small so she was able to shove away the timelines where they fitted, which narrowed the remaining timelines down to ten. That was a number she could work with.

 

The problem of her boots and the rest of her clothing remained. She currently looked like an adult wearing children’s clothing, if an officer’s uniform counted as that. Disturbingly, it wasn’t as ill-fitting as she expected it to be. Either she regenerated into a very young-looking person or she was shorter this time. Being used to always having an impressive body height, she caught herself hoping it was the former. As uncomfortable as her clothing was, the boots were a clear annoyance. She was a Time Lady, however, and members of her species didn’t walk around barefooted. It hurt a lot to keep them on, so she closed her eyes and sighed.  
She was abandoned on some rock that only time itself knew when and where. There was certainly more dignity in standing barefooted than covering in the dust and being unable to walk. She carefully slipped out of her boots and massaged her feet to ease the pain. She shoved four other timelines away in which she decided to keep those things on (too many for her liking if she was honest), selected another one where she had a ring on her left finger, pushed it away and froze.

  
She never wore a ring, but that didn’t mean she did not own any jewellery. Frightened, her hand glided slowly to her collar and clasped around the golden pendant on the fine necklace. This time she wasn’t able to hold back a tiny sob. Thank the Guardians! She quickly reached on the back of her neck and unclasped the necklace, before carefully examining her precious treasure. Still the same symbol on the front, and still the same inscription on the back.

 

_Although they had every right to take it, they didn’t._ The thought surprised her.

 

Who were they? Her mind didn’t provide an answer, so she shrugged it off and placed the jewellery around her neck once more. She stroked her hair out of her face and stood up, brushing the dirt from her uniform and turned around. All timelines somehow indicated a human colony, sometimes by a silver dome on the horizon, sometimes by bare lands, wasted by a terrible war, or fields growing crops. If she was able to reach that colony, perhaps…

 

She stepped onto something cold and metallic: a fob watch. She bent down and picked it up by its chain. The golden metal was engraved with calligraphic script, constructed to please the eyes and not to be read. The back was plain except for three contact points. A Chameleon Arch. The device that held her mind prisoner for more than _thousand_ years. But she just regenerated…

 

_Those lazy, oath-breaking half-bloods!_ She released an earth-shattering scream, causing some of the winged creatures on the trees to flee. Of course, they were going to flee.

 

Everything fled before her. Everything was scared of her.

  
The council had known. They knew that regeneration sickness affected her differently than other Time Lords. They knew that she lost herself in time, that she needed assistance, or at least Gallifrey itself under her feet to come back. Still, they hadn’t allowed her to recover but simply shoved her into the Arch. They never planned to release her again. They were too scared of her.  


Of course, that’s why the other one left her behind, too. The second the TARDIS found out her name, who Lady Storyteller had been before the war, the time machine told him and he left.

  
She took a calming breath and opened the device. The clockwork still worked, so at least it had some use other than remind her to never trust anyone again. She stuffed the watch into a pocket and stared at the sky. Although she wasn’t able to see the stars in broad daylight, she was able to listen to their song. The eternal music of the spheres.

 

She frowned. Whenever the council sent her on a mission during the war, she always took pride in finding her home’s direction just by listening to the movement of the universe. She even taught it to others, but now… something was wrong. The time war devastated whole quadrants of this universe, so of course it sounded different. The Time Lady tried again and there, the Minyan constellation of Kasterborous. On the other corner of the universe.

 

How for time’s sake was she going to find a way to get there?

  
_What in the name of…_

 

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. The Home Constellation was out of turn, unbalanced. It stumbled sometimes, not very often but often enough to recognize a gaping hole in it, not big but enough to cause a slight disharmony. It had been hurt, terribly hurt, but had enough time to heal. Like a dancer breaking their ankle but able to continue their profession after a long recovery, coming to terms and adapting their choreography to steps they were still able to perform, although they sometimes limped.

 

There was a whole planet missing. Lady Storyteller closed her eyes and concentrated. She searched for the comforting tune, the song she was able to recognise everywhere. It wasn’t there.

  
Gallifrey.

 

_Gallifrey_ wasn’t there.

  
Down from the depths of her mind rose a memory, what was left of the mind of an obedient and dutiful Kapoaka. The memory of an old man—no—Time Lord with short and curly silver locks accompanied by a human girl with dark skin and black hair, and a petite but graceful Time Lady who stood before the gathered crowd in the assembly hall of the colony and told about the last day of the Great Time War. How the Daleks had perished. How they had taken Gallifrey with them.

   
Now, with the colony gone, she and the Time Lord who abandoned her on this place were most certainly the only ones of her species left. A bitter laugh escaped her. That certainly hadn’t gone as planned by those fools. She told them the resurrection of Rassilon wasn’t a good idea, but they never listened to her. They only used her abilities, not her advice.

 

She closed her eyes to concentrate on that twitching nerve in the back of her brain, searching for the lights indicating the other members of her species but there was only one. Only one left, one and a half to be exact which was strange, but she didn’t search any further. _Probably another one locked in a pocket watch._

  
Her priority was to contact the one with the TARDIS, to convince him that she meant no harm. Out of instinct she reached into her pocket, searching for the white squares to form a cube, and growled in annoyance. Until half an hour ago she had been anything but a Time Lady, so why did she even expect to have something like that with her?

 

_So, that human colony then._ She only took a few steps when suddenly, there was a strange noise sending shivers down her neck. A TARDIS engine.

  
An old, rusty TARDIS engine, the pilot having no idea how to handle her, if the screeching sound of the transmission was any indication. Perhaps the silly rumours of a telepathic connection between Time Lords other than just the ability of recognising a member of the same species were true, or he truly came back for her.

 

She arranged her face into the mask she had worn her whole lives, appropriate for a lady of her standing and waited. She watched as the outline of a blue wooden box with a blinking light, decorated with white panels and alien script slowly materialised. She knew that characteristic fading in and out: a Type 40. This TT should be in a museum, not in active duty, although it warmed her heart to see one of this legendary model again.

  
Apparently a young Time Lord escaped the time lock by simply taking the next travelling device at hand, which happened to be an old museum piece. Nobody who graduated the academy, or at least not for long, was able to torment a poor TARDIS like that. It was an excellent plan as all TTs had been grounded except the museum pieces because nobody expected them to be functional anymore. Whoever was in there had no idea how to fly a TARDIS properly, but they at least had a quick mind.

  
The landing drum pounded and silence stretched itself for a few seconds before a door opened with a screeching. The nerve in the back of her brain switched, indicating that this was the other one indeed. The first thing she noticed was his enormous chin and his fluffy, longer hair. He had a flat nose and big, old green eyes. His clothing was alien and as improper as hers, trousers a bit too short, a shirt, strange red bands over his shoulders clasped to his trousers, a short brown jacket and a… ribbon around his neck?

  
His eyes were old enough to easily be in the second part of his regeneration cycle, but he fidgeted with his hands and eyed her warily like a sixty-year-old as he slowly approached her. She didn’t move and simply waited, watching him. He stopped and scratched his head, eying her unbelievingly, letting the silence stretch out into awkwardness. She tilted her head to the side, studying him as blunt as he did to her.

  
He blushed and fingered with that thing around his neck, straightening it.

 

“Hello.” His voice was uncertain but hopeful.

  
She bowed, her upper body moving down exactly thirty degrees while her gaze never left his, her hand in the correct position before her belly.

 

“Luck and precious times, Milord.”

  
He blushed, “No, no need to be so formal. I’m the Doctor. Just Doctor, without Lord or anything.”

  
The Doctor.

  
Of course. Who else? That TARDIS and his clothing should have been a dead giveaway. He refused to dress himself properly even while being the president of Gallifrey after all.

 

She had never met that living annoyance personally. She only knew him from Borusa’s constant complaints and the legends of the Time War, but they were enough. In comparison to his crimes, her doing was a harmless, little joke. He had done it.

 

He had killed them, killed them all and destroyed home. This Thing before her was the reason the constellation of Kasterborous limped, of her never being able to hear her beloved Gallifrey sing again. And now she had to travel with that foolish murderer and his beloved humans in that old, Mack III Type 40 across the universe.

  
Still, deep down inside her two hearts she still preferred this to the loneliness of being the only one left of her kind and it made her sick. However, being a member of the noble race of the Time Lords, she pushed the wrath and bloodthirst down, and nodded instead.

 

“Lady Storyteller. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  
His wide gleam nearly made her vomit.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I present to you the first meeting between the Doctor and Lady Storyteller. Yes, she hates his guts and some time will be needed for her to calm down. It heavily draws on a fic called Leviathan, which I ‘ll simultaneously post. It’s a stand alone but also a prequel to this. Next chapter we’ll see the events through Amy’s POV and she’ll recall what happened previously, so it won’t be a problem.
> 
> This started out as a little experiment with another Time Lord reacting to things happening in the show (just some one shots), but it turned into this big tale of Lady Storyteller and the Doctor. There’s no pairing between them. They even have issues becoming friends but I think that’s the charm with her. I’ll try to add new stuff as soon as possible, but I’ll focus on finishing Leviathan first.
> 
> Please tell me what you think of this and if I shall continue.
> 
> Greetings  
> alkatie 
> 
> 04062017


End file.
